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I Love You Again

Amnesia, often used as a device for heavy melodrama, is given a humorous spin in
I Love You Again, a 1940 screwball comedy starring one of Hollywood's
most popular screen teams of all time. William Powell stars as an upright small-town
citizen, the very model of sobriety and civic responsibility, who receives a blow
to the head and discovers he has been suffering from amnesia for nearly a decade.
His true identity, it turns out, is a con man with a long history of scheming and
scamming. Finding himself solidly in the money, he decides to keep up the pretense
of being the staid Rotary Club type long enough to take the money and run, but he
soon "meets" his wife (Myrna Loy). Although they fell in love and married
during his amnesiac phase, she has grown bored with being married to a stuffed shirt
and plans to divorce him. He sets out to court her all over again, and she begins
to suspect his true identity. It all works out on the side of happily ever after,
but not before another blow to the head adds a further twist to this wacky Jekyll-and-Hyde
tale.

The plot of I Love You Again was rather improbable, but audiences
didn't mind a bit, as long as they could spend a couple of hours in the company
of Loy and Powell. The two first acted together in Manhattan Melodrama
(1934), with Loy playing the object of affection of both gangster Clark Gable and
his boyhood pal, district attorney Powell. But the true spark was ignited when they
were cast as the hard-drinking, bantering couple Nick and Nora Charles in the film
version of Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man (1934). At this point
in her career, Loy had just recently begun to emerge from her early typecasting
as exotic ethnic women - often playing femme fatales with names like Coco, Yasmani
and Mulatta - despite her background as a middle-class WASP girl from Montana. With
the advent of sound she began to get better, more suitable roles as witty, modern
urban women.

Powell had a long career stretching back to the early 1920s, generally as a slick,
mustachioed sophisticate and occasional villain. He had begun to achieve stardom
as the debonair sleuth Philo Vance in a series of pictures at Warner Brothers. But
their chemistry together as Nick and Nora and their easy handling of both the mystery
and comedy elements of Hammett's story brought them both to a new level and established
a partnership that would span 13 years and 14 pictures, six of them in the Thin
Man series alone. Director W.S. "Woody" Van Dyke, who first brought them
together, directed them in six films, including I Love You Again.

When this picture was made, Powell was just bouncing back after a rough patch in
his life. While still grieving over the untimely death of his lover, Jean Harlow,
in 1937, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Although he beat the disease, his recovery
and the emotional stress he suffered kept him off the screen for a year (which was
unusual in a time when stars typically cranked out multiple pictures annually).
He re-emerged with his eighth teaming with Loy in Another Thin Man
(1939), followed the next year by this successful marital comedy with its amnesia
theme.

Just prior to production on this movie, Loy had taken a brief vacation from her
home studio, MGM, to visit Montana with her mother (and a break from her marriage
to producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr., which was beginning to show signs of the discord
that would lead to a 1942 divorce). She returned from her trip expecting to begin
work on Joseph Mankiewicz's film adaptation of Robert Sherwood's hit play The
Road to Rome. Clark Gable (another popular and frequent Loy co-star) was
to have played Hannibal, and Loy was looking forward to the role of the Roman senator's
wife who beguiles him. But the play's anti-war message was considered a losing proposition
for a world plunged into conflict and a country on the verge of joining it, so the
project was scrapped. Instead, Loy found herself in this comedy, with the great
compensation of working with Powell again. "I never enjoyed my work more than
when I worked with William Powell," she later said. "He was a brilliant
actor, a delightful companion, a great friend and above all, a true gentleman."

The gentleman, however, was not above pulling a prank on his old friend to surprise
her for her birthday. Powell conspired with the director and crew to run the camera
with no film while he inexplicably began blowing his lines. Pretending to be rattled
and in need of a private rehearsal, he pulled Loy to a corner of the big soundstage.
As they approached a tall black canvas flat, it began to shake and looked like it
was falling towards them just as the lights suddenly went out. The terrified Loy
screamed in the blackness, but nothing happened. And when the lights came back on
she saw, where the flat had been, a decorated table with a huge birthday cake.

I Love You Again was such a success the studio decided to capitalize
on the formula by bringing Loy and Powell back together for Love Crazy
(1941), in which he pretends to be insane in order to prevent their divorce.